Summer arrived in Aguadilla safe and sound last night. Her flight was scheduled to land around 3:30am but it landed more around 4:00am. The flowers I picked for her were VERY wilted 5 hours later by the time I got to the airport so I was too embarrassed to bring them into the airport. I knew she would appreciate them once we got back to the car and she did. Not to self…if I had electricity I would have put them in the fridge…lol
By the time she got her bags and we made it back to Rincon it was close to 5:00am. I cooked her up some vegetable soup (no restaurants were open in JFK) and we went to sleep about 15 minutes after the VERY hot sun started to rise. Today was a rough one, but we made it all day running errands (got a $50 parking ticket at the attorney’s office) and now we are chillin’ at Marks…Summer is on the final poker table and I have a few minutes to update you guys. Overall, EPIC DAY with my girl.
I did a really really stupid thing yesterday and let me tell you, I learned my lesson.
I pulled the sheets off of my bed to laundry and in doing so I pulled the mosquito net off as well…and just let it hang above the bed, I planned on putting the net back on with the clean sheets. This was the big mistake. You can see how mosquito nets fit around the bed here…
When I came home from Marks last night (we had a golf tournament on his playstation) I made the bed, tucked in the netting and settled in for a warm nights mosquito free rest. Wow…was I wrong. I never felt any of the mosquitoes biting me but I started itching all over. I wasn’t really sleeping anyway, like a kid the night before Disney World, Summer arrives late tonight so I was just kinda staring at the ceiling waiting for sleep to fast forward the next 8 hours. Well…it got to the point where there was no way I would be able to fall asleep with how much I was itching. I turned on the flashlight and looked around the netting but couldn’t find any mosquitoes and I didn’t hear any buzzing around my ears so I figured the bites must have been from earlier in the day and the itching was just kicking in because I wasn’t preoccupied with other things.
This morning when I woke up, the first thing I saw was about 30 pillsbury dough boy mosquitoes chilling on the net right above my head. The more I looked around the more I saw. My mosquito netting trapped the little buggers in there instead of keeping them out…and I am covered with itchy red bumps.
What’s the lesson? ALWAYS ALWAYS KEEP YOUR NETTING TUCKED UNDER THE BED. Lesson learned.
The talk of the town for the past two days has been two fold;
1. This is the hottest summer in 5 years (it is still in the 90’s at night some nights)
2. The swell is on the way
As far as number 2 goes, Josh and I woke up early to surf but the swell hasn’t hit yet. It is knee high on the sets and there is some texture on the water. It wasn’t inviting enough for me to blow off work but Josh is down there splashing around to kick the cobwebs and cool off.
As far as number 1 goes…jeez, we sure need some fans/ac at the house ASAP!
We finished up the infamous electrical pedestal on Friday. It took us about 3 full days of work to get it done. Now, the three days were spread out over about 5 due to rain delays and runs back and forth to Home Depot.
The pedestal is a required item by the electric company here in Puerto Rico. The meter needs to be no less than 5ft up from the ground and the top of the galvanized pipe needs to be 5ft from the meter. Once all of the cement was dry we are at about 8ft to the meter box with exactly 5ft to the top of the galvanized pipe (this is where the electric company will feed all of their wire into our box giving us power).
We had to build the box on a hill and we were dealing with a lot of huge boulders under ground, so we erred on the side of caution and made it a little bit bigger so we wouldn’t have to tear it out and do it again. All of our estimated for a meter pedestal were between $2500 and $3000 but we installed it ourselves for a little under $900 including labor. As long as it passed inspection (which it did), it was a good move. I definitely would have been kicking myself if we had to rip it down and redo it.
Here are some pictures I took over the construction of the electric pedestal to completion. At this point, the only thing not done is filling in the giant ditch we needed dig to bury the 3x 1/0 wire and Number 6 ground wire in 2 inch PVC, the coaxial cable, CAT5 for up to 4 phone lines and two extra pipes. One 1 inch pipe to run power back up to the top of the property for a gate and lights and another 2” pipe for our second meter which could eventually have 3 more 1/0 and a ground. The second meter is so we don’t have to spend another $3k in a couple of years if we ever decide to build another house on the property to rent or sell. It only cost us about $200 more to do it now…so we went for it.
The guy who owned the house before Summer and I bought it had a basic little set up to sleep and “take care of business” while he was down here working on it (he was a contractor from New Jersey). He was much more hard core than Summer and I. As soon as we saw this little portable toilet it needed to vacate the premises. We never used it, but for some stupid reason it never made it past the front porch. Here is a picture of me putting it to good use while chillin’ in the hammock. Gross.
I have been down here working hard every day on the house all day and on the computer every night. I have been playing poker at a buddies house ($10 buy in) 2 or 3 nights a week and have been driving all over the West Side of Puerto Rico looking for the best prices or simply looking for something that is not readily available in Puerto Rico (for example: Jet Line to pull the wire through the pipe).
It is 88-95 degrees every day and working in the sun is hard and tiring. It is very rewarding working on our house, but I am still exhausted every day. BUT, I still manage to think about Summer all day every day and how great it is going to be when she can move down here permanently.
Summer flies into Aguadilla on Monday at 4:00am. We have a lot to do together this week; pick out bathroom fixtures, decide the shape of our staircase, decide the type of wood (needs to match the wood floors we are going to get upstairs…but not until October..so we need to make a decision this week), pick out designs for our cabinets (color and shape), decide on which type of concrete counter top we are going to get, pick out our kitchen appliances, decide the shape of the back porch, ceiling fans, sconce lighting, track lighting, bathtub, type/color of tile for the bathrooms etc.
I can’t wait to pick up Summer at the airport. 2.5 days to go.
I picked up the electric company’s estimate to install the poles AND run the power lines to the house. The cost was about the same as all of the other estimates, but the power company estimate includes the wire they will be running to our property. If we went through a contractor, we would have had to pay for the wire as well, which as you read below…is over $2 a foot. Considering that we would need to run about 400ft, that would have added another $800 to the tab.
I also have to meet the owner of the property where we are installing one of the poles on Monday at the attorney’s office to get him to sign off and have it notarized. With his permission officially documented, I will be able to return to the electric company and get the ball rolling after I give them a large bankers check and sign some paperwork.
While I am there, I will also need to pay the power company to install the meter on our electrical pedestal so once they install the poles and run the lines they will hook them up to the pedestal and start charging us for POWER!
The official estimate says that once I pay, it will take them about three months to install the poles and power lines. Hopefully my neighbors will be able to help us move the process along with all of their connections and we won’t need to wait the three months that they are telling us…but either way, three months or two weeks, it will be good to get another major “To Do” item off of our list.
Today I scheduled for our shippers/movers to pick up our stuff on July 11th. I went with IntlMove.com for the job of moving our stuff from California to Puerto Rico. They seem quite reputable and their BBB record was pretty clean. They’ve also been very informative and helpful with all of my questions. I’ve scheduled door to door service for 500 cubic feet for the price of $3800. The $3800 is a quote and if we end up going over the 500 cubic feet with our items, the shipper charges $8 per extra cubic foot. Unfortunately, if we end up under 500 cubic feet, they do not offer a refund for unused space. So fill er up! Just not too much…:)
Nelson, the retired electrician running our “power main” from the pedestal to the house, showed up at 6:00am honking his horn. He was ready to go and we were working all night getting ready for him.
In the last couple of days we have built the pedestal (I’ll show you pictures once I can do a start to finish pictorial), arranged the electrician, arranged certification, met at the house with the power company and got approval from the owners of the properties where the Cement Utility Poles will be located, purchased 1,000 feet of 1/0 copper wire ($2 a foot at the cheapest place on the island where I bought it…home depot was $2.95 a foot and it was $3 a foot in Rincon), purchased the PVC pipe to run the wires in and arranged and dug a 3 foot deep trench from the our property line to the house to run the cables in. Also purchased galvanized pipe, ground wire, copper ground rod, couplings, PVC glue, Jet Line etc…
We worked all day yesterday and into the night. We were gluing the PVC pipes until 10:30pm last night under lantern light (the generator is too loud to run at night) so we could be ready for Nelson this morning.
We sucked some “Jet Line” through the pipe with a vacuum tied off the other end and pulled about 400lbs worth of wires down to the house. Once nelson finished up, he told me that he is going to get me my certification by Monday or Tuesday. I then have to take that certification to the Electric Company and apply for and pay for an electric meter. Before we have power though, we need power lines out to our property. I met with that guy yesterday and I am going to go to see him at his office in the electric company building in Aguadilla. There I apply and pay for 2 cement poles. So, we’ll have the ball rolling with both power to the pedestal AND power to the house from the pedestal. Stoked.
We didn’t finish running our CAT5 and Coaxil cable until about 3:30pm. It was hot today too…91 degrees with 80% humidity. Luckily, it didn’t rain yesterday or today though…our trench has been safe. By the time we wrapped up I ran down the hill to the neighbors valley and raided there mango tree (with permission). mmmm…. Puerto Rican Mangos! And there in our valley.
I put the camera on a tree branch to take this video…but I cut my head off. Oh well, this was a one time thing.
